The present invention relates to techniques for correcting errors that can occur when performing character-recognition operations on documents.
Character-recognition techniques are widely used to extract information in documents by converting data in an initial format (such as bitmap) into another format (such as ASCII). For example, optical character recognition (OCR) is often used to convert printed text to corresponding digital values, and intelligent character recognition (ICR) is often used to convert handwritten text to corresponding digital values.
Unfortunately, the conversion performed by most character-recognition techniques is not perfect, and there is always a finite probability of errors. These errors can significantly complicate and increase the expense of subsequent processing of the extracted information.